The Phonetics of Mandarin Tones in Conversation

Abstract

Mandarin tone categories are universally thought to center on pitch information, but previous work (Berry, 2009; Brenner, 2013) has shown that pitch cues reduce in the conversational context, as do the other concurrent cues such as duration or intensity that secondarily signal tone categories. This dissertation presents two experiments (an isolated word perception experiment, and a dictation experiment) aimed at discovering how Mandarin listeners deal with these reduced cues under everyday conversational conditions. It is found that detailed spectral information is far more useful in the perception of Mandarin tones—both in isolated words and in the perception of full conversational utterances—than pitch contours, and that the removal of pitch from the recordings does not greatly influence perception of the tone categories. 普遍认为汉语声调主要依赖音高信息，但也有研究表明，音高线索在会话环境中会减弱，声调相关的时长与音强信息也会减弱（比如：Berry，2009; Brenner，2013）。 本文通过两个实验，一个孤立的单词感知实验与一个听写实验，旨在探索汉语听话人如何在日常会话条件下处理这些减弱的线索。 研究发现，详细的声谱信息在汉语声调的感知中比音高曲线更为有用，无论是在孤立的单词中还是在完全对话话语的句子感知中；而且，从录音中去除音高曲线并不会对声调类别感知有重要影响。